Le Doobie’s is a name that Paris night owls of a certain vintage remember with more than a little nostalgia. Born in 1938 and, by the 1990s and 2000s, one of the hottest hangouts around the Champs-Élysées – where seemingly every Paris celebrity worth knowing rubbed shoulders – the restaurant-bar is being resurrected this September after some twenty years away and three years of construction.
For this new chapter, Must Group has envisioned a 130-seat venue where dinner is meant to gradually slip into nightlife. To bring Le Doobie’s into the present without turning it into yet another restaurant-club on steroids, architect Arnaud Behzadi has embraced the concept of a “collector’s home.” Guests move between a grand salon, boudoir, winter garden and late-night bar, all arranged around a central rotunda with four distinct faces. Marble, lacquer, precious wood paneling, works of art and an open kitchen set behind a glass partition come together in this fantasy apartment, designed to reveal itself room by room.
As for the food, it remains a mystery for now: neither a menu nor the name of the chef has yet been announced, all the more reason to wait until the doors actually open before passing judgment. We know more about what happens after dinner: a selector will steer the soundtrack between ’90s R&B, Chicago house and hits spanning the 1980s through the 2000s, from Madonna to Daft Punk. The question now is whether this resurrection can do more than simply replay the nostalgia of Paris nights gone by.
